Like the Rifle
by Little Boy of Lothering
Summary: Jess, Cassie, Lisa, Amelia, and the way the four women viewed the Winchester boys.


Don't ask me why, I just felt like writing this.

Implied Wincest.

Warning: non-canon compliant of Sam looking for Dean because fuck the fact that he didn't. I refuse to believe there's more to that story and if there's no big secret, I will be sorely disappointed. :(

Disclaimer: only own what you don't recognize.

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"Like the Rifle"

Sam doesn't talk about his family.

There's a brother named Dean who he loves very much, Jess knows, and his mother's dead. She's still in the dark as to his parents names, but he did tell her his mom died in a fire when he was six months old. His body is littered with scars and she wonders if he doesn't talk about them all that much because his dad hit him around. There's one on his temple, usually hidden underneath his hair, that looks like it'd been cracked on a table corner. They moved around a lot too, he said, and she thinks maybe that's why Child Services never caught on.

He wears baggy clothes and likes to have his hands in his pockets. He's mild mannered and in the two years that they've been with each other, the only time he got angry was when she asked if that was Dean calling for his birthday. This freaks her out because normal couples fight and she's so in love with him that she's scared it means he likes her less. But he has the smile that he gives only her that's small and subdued but brings out those cute little dimples anyway and all fears are dispelled. Sam Winchester is hers, and hers alone.

Or so she tells herself. She knows it isn't because of a woman when his eyes drift to his cell phone or he zones out in the middle of a conversation or gets in one of those moods where getting him to talk is borderline impossible. Other times he'll get jumpy and on days like that, she'll find very thin layers of salt lined up on the windows and doors. That's another thing that worries her, to be honest, but she doesn't want to bring it up. To be truthful with herself, she doesn't want to know the answer. All she really wants to know is what is family is like and whether or not he's so quiet because he was abused and why he won't let her help him. She's a psych major, not pre-law, and she might be young but she's pretty intuitive anyway. When looking at all those components together, she knows no matter how much he loves her, there's a part of him that can never be hers.

Then the man shows up in their apartment at two in the morning, standing too close to her Sam with what little light there is reflecting off the greenest eyes she'd ever seen.

"Jess, this is Dean."

Everything falls into place suddenly when the man turns around and his green eyes and sneaky smile are here to rip her boyfriend away from her. "Dean?" she repeats. "Your brother Dean?"

She standing here in the doorway in nothing but a pair of boy-shorts and pajama shirt without a bra. He's blatantly flirting with her and she expects Sam to tell him to stop but he doesn't, looking on with exasperation instead. They look alike at the right angle, though Dean doesn't seem as sweet. From the way her boyfriend looks at him though, she knows that it doesn't matter. He's doing that smile that's supposed to be all hers and hers alone except different at the same time because the rest of the world is gone.

When they leave, she eavesdrops shamelessly from the bedroom window, though their voices are too quiet to actually hear. They don't touch, but the stand close. She doesn't know how to describe the way Dean looks at Sam - like a brother, like a father, like something else entirely - but she understands what this means.

"You never even talk about your family and now you're going off to spend a weekend with them?"

Sam's back in the room, packing and tells that it'll be fine, that he'll be back by Monday. She wants to believe him but she can't because when he kisses her goodbye it's only on cheek and no hug accompanies it. Then he walks out of her life as easy as he slid himself in and she watches that shiny black car drive away, the man she was hoping to marry one day sitting in the front seat with the person who holds his heart.

Finally, two days later, here's Bradley and his eyes are pitched black and she finally understands that her boyfriend is poison and she was dead the moment she shook his hand.

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"Who's that?" Cassie asks on their third night together, catching the sight of a boy sitting next to Dean on the hood of his car, all smiles and puppy dog eyes.

Dean glances down, checking what she's look at. "His name's Sam," he says. "He goes to Stanford." For a moment there she reads into it wrong and her, well, whatever he is, quickly adds, "Sammy's my little brother."

The boy's smile is a lot kinder than Dean's. Almost the same, but without that edge. Even so, she can see that they're related. They've got the same sort of eyes, even if the color is different. "How much younger?" she says.

"Four years," he answers and shuts the wallet, sliding it back into his pocket. "Look, I have to go. Work starts in fifteen."

A month ago, he booked a motel in town and got a job at the local mechanic, slipping in so quickly it actually comes as a surprise. "Okay," she says and gives him a kiss. She isn't sure if they're dating, but if not, it's definitely something similar. "I'll see you later."

At her job at the diner later, she sees a family that's never been there before, the two brothers sitting next to each other. The older one plays with his Game Boy and the younger scribbles on the paper place mat with a bright red crayon. She thinks about Dean and that little brother of his and the way they smiled at the camera. A month isn't that long and he isn't the type to talk about himself, so she doesn't know a whole lot about his childhood. Now, though, she knows that a brother was involved. A brother with lanky limbs and shaggy hair and smart enough to go to one of the best schools in the country. She wonders if she'll ever get to meet him or if Dean will at least tell a story or two. Maybe what his major is or if he used to worship his older brother like siblings tend to do.

When she finally does meet him, she wishes she hadn't.

He's the same boy in the photo, for the most part, but his eyes aren't the same. They're sad rather than sharp and his smile has that edge now, too. He and Dean stand a little too close together and when they talk, it's the type filled with low voices and soundless communication. He helps save her and her dad and uncover the truth she tried so hard not to believe years earlier. This is the kid who'd gone to Stanford and should've gotten a good job with the major she doesn't know and married a pretty woman. Cassie is far from blind.

Then things between her and Dean get too heated and like a loop, they end up in bed. In the morning she tries not to see Sam's horrified face and the tone his brother uses to apologize. Suddenly she feels like a bitch and homewrecker and tells herself that it doesn't really matter because if this is what she thinks it is, then it's fucked up enough already.

It takes a shocking amount of effort to pretend she doesn't feel guilty all the same.

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Lisa knows that Dean Winchester's life was all kinds of crazy and on a certain level, she finds it heartbreaking the way he acts with Ben.

Surprisingly quickly, he'd cleaned up his act and assimilated to life inside the home and in the neighborhood. He's a good boyfriend and a good guy in general, even though she and her son are the only two who know there's a large chunk of him missing. It wouldn't be so obvious, maybe, if it weren't for Ben. But everything about his patient, fatherly nature to him screams of Sam. She doesn't know much, but she knows enough - knows about his dad's repeated absences and all the time "Sammy" would get sick or hurt and even though he's only four years older, that Dean raised him. She imagines this is pretty similar.

Sometimes she thinks that it's a dream because as tragic as this is, it's the happiest she's felt in years. Whether he has a nightmare or not, she loves waking up to the feeling of Dean's warm body next to her, arm wrapped around her waist. She loves the way he cooks them breakfast on weekends and will mix her up some girly drink because her day was just too hard to deal with. He's more affectionate than he had been years ago, hugging her from behind and brushing his lips to the back of her neck or kissing that one last time before they go bed. He'll bring Ben to all his games and occasionally picks him up from school, too. There's no way this can be reality, she knows.

In the end, she understands that it all comes down to Sam. They don't mention him because Dean doesn't want to and they don't talk about whoever the Cas whose name he's thrown out once or twice is. All she knows is that he's her boyfriend's best friend and Dean's not sure where he is at the moment. Probably fighting a war, he says on day when he's more than just a little tipsy and the lights are off and they're lying together in bed. Probably in a war because Sammy saved the world. My brother saved the world, Lise, and it should've been me.

Ben asks about him once in the beginning, about the guy who was with Dean the day he was taken away, but no information other than their familial relation and that his name is Sam is explained. The way he says his brother's name sort of scares her, if she's honest - it's all soft and broken like something altogether different than the tone she and her own siblings use. He's like a tragic hero in some novel, the guy who goes around the country protecting people like her and her son and deals with whatever bullshit the world throws at him.

Because Sam might be the one who's gone, but part of Dean has disappeared too.

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There's a lot wrong with Sam. Or, at lot more than there is with Amelia anyway.

Like the problem he has with his cellphone, for example, when he answers the call only to hang up a moment later and toss it to the nearest soft landing point. He always look so terrified. There are also the ways he just sort of checks out sometimes like her dad used to when she was a kid and he'd returned from war and once he comes back, it takes him a few seconds to figure out what's going on. One day he had a panic attack because a light started flickering and he's always pouring over old books and websites, taking notes in Latin and what looks like Hebrew of Arabic. A lot of times there'll be doodles on the margins of the paper made up of strange symbols he said he used a lot in Stanford. That he was a pre-law major with a minor in theology.

He doesn't talk about himself much. All she knows is that he has a brother named Dean who's not dead but gone and it's up to him to find a way to bring him back. Amelia doesn't know what he's talking about, but a deep, severely repressed part of her knows what that means; one day, when he gets his brother back, he's leaving. He doesn't say much about this Dean or his family, but the look that crosses his face when he talks about him. It's the look she sees on little kids when their pet needs to be put down.

There's a picture tucked into the inside pocket of his jacket that she discovers by accident and doesn't tell him she found. On the back it reads _Dean and Cas '11_ in Sam's neat, loopy handwriting. Despite only two names being written, it's actually three people. Her boyfriend's sitting on the right, his hair shorter than it is now and both his eyes and smile more focused. Looking at it, she thinks for the first time that there might be more wrong with him than she thought. Then there's the one who must be Dean in the middle because he has the brilliant smile described to her once and small freckles across the bridge of his nose. They stand close together, much closer than most siblings, though from the clues Sam accidently dropped here and there, she's gathered that he was something of a father too. On left is another man, one wearing a trench coat with a weird shadow cast on the ground and a happy facial expression that seems foreign. A friend, maybe? She doesn't know because Sam doesn't talk about those, either.

Eventually she does get to find out who "Cas" is, but not in the way she wants to. Rather than him telling her, Sam wakes up with a scream and that scream is name of someone other than his big brother. She's awake too, confused but having dealt with this enough that she knows he needs some help through this, that he can't figure out reality right away. "Sorry," he says when she sits up. "I - sorry for waking you up."

He's shaking. Badly. "It's fine," she says, touching a hand to his shoulder. "Another nightmare?"

Even though he nods, she knows it's more than it. He said it once, during one of those times where he was having trouble remembering what's real, that a lot of his dreams are just memories, and that makes it worse. This scares her because even though he doesn't talk in his sleep often, she's heard other names too. Most common is Dean's, but she's heard "Gabriel" and "Bobby" and "_Lucifer_" enough times to know he isn't as open with her as she is to him. She's a private person, but they're intimate now and that means she's terrible at keeping secrets. Of all the people she had to love, it just had to be the man filled to brim with his own.

Normally she wouldn't ask because she doesn't about the others but she remembers the picture with the man in the trench coat and weird, unfamiliar smile on his face. "Who's Cas?" she says before she can stop herself, remind herself that Sam probably doesn't talk about himself for a reason. But he says he loves her, and those who love each other are supposed to tell secrets, right?

"A friend," he says, voice unsteady. "He - with my brother. That stupid, stupid angel -" He cuts himself off and looks at her, eyes snapping back to focused again. He does that a lot, like he's talking to her but listening to someone else he's trying to ignore.

"Angel?" Men usually don't say that about other men, she thinks.

He tells her, "It's a joke. Had a weird family, all his brothers and sisters named after angels." Lucifer. Gabriel. And Bobby is unrelated, just Sam's uncle is all but dead. "Castiel. Angel of Thursday. Sorry, I'm tired. We should go back to sleep."

And they do, his breathing eventually evening out, though it seems faked. She tucks her head under his chin, trying to fall back asleep herself but her mind is whirling, trying to figure up from down. Angel must be a joke is all, just like he said, but it sounded like a lie and she thinks to the picture and that strange shadow, which brings in other thoughts too. Like how close he and Dean were standing and that lost sort of look he gets in his eye when he talks about him. She's second best, she knows this, but something tells her now that she might even be third or fourth. Sam is so locked down that she understands that there are places she can't go. He's roped off, hidden in his own skin, and in his eyes are a thousand years. She thinks to herself, for the first time, that Sam might be her biggest tragedy.

Next day she checks the picture again and sees that Castiel's shadow has wings.

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Hope you enjoyed! I know it's weird, but whatever. I got hit by the plot bunny bug, I guess.


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